When the first trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign dropped during The Game Awards 2024, one of the most surprising revelations from the announcement other than the game itself was the Nameless King sighting. FromSoftware’s community has modded anything and everything into the Souls games, Elden Ring included, but seeing the Nameless King in Elden Ring in an official capacity felt too good to be true. Coincidently, that’s what Elden Ring Nightreign feels like, too: an anomaly that shouldn’t be able to work nearly as well as it does.
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Much of my appreciation for Elden Ring Nightreign after spending a few hours with the Elden Ring spin-off stems just how incredulously well FromSoftware has woven in ideas that truly do feel like they belong in a modded version of Elden Ring. There’s no fall damage, for one, and leveling up has been simplified so that your stats gained are tied to your class without any guesswork or planning needed on your part. There’s also a non-human, bird-like character to play as via the Guardian class which, in true Elden Ring fashion, has very little context in the grand scheme of things beyond that.
Those new features make up just a small part of Nightreign’s alternate world of Limveld, and frankly, they’re equivalent in scope to what we got to see from the game. Nightreign will have eight classes called “Nightfarers” to start with when the game launches on May 30th, but we only got to see four of them – the Wylder, Guardian, Recluse, and Duchess – during the hands-on preview. Of those, I spent the most time with the Wylder and Guardian which embodied more melee-focused builds, the first being an all-around combat pro while the second was better suited for defense and support. After a few hours with Nightreign and some (failed) jaunts through the game’s three-night circuit, I felt I’d barely scratched the surface of those two classes, let alone the other two, and that’s before we even address the other four that’ll be available at launch.
What’s most intriguing about these new Nightfarers are the two abilities each class possesses which are unique to the individual characters. The Guardian, for example, has an ability that’ll do quite a bit of stagger damage in a sweeping area and is the perfect solution for interrupting combos and getting a boss to crit territory. The Guardian’s ultimate is a superhero landing that does big damage and provides some sort of supportive effect for teammates. Having your health depleted in Nightreign means being put in a downed state like in a battle royale game where your teammates have to “damage” you to get you back up, so you can imagine how a massive AOE attack from a supportive class like the Guardian works in tandem with Nightreign‘s system. One ultimate ability and your downed teammates are back in the fight.
One of the best parts of my Nightreign experience was how loot was handled. When clearing small camps as you amass your arsenal while the ring of fire pushes you towards one final boss fight at the end of each night, you’ll find chests and other containers filled with loot to claim. If it’s “ground loot” you just happen upon, it’s fair game for anyone, so it’s up to you and your teammates to figure out who gets what. If you triumph over a boss or solve some puzzle, you get individualized loot where you get to choose one of three options that are unique to each player, so no greeding over the good stuff in Nightreign.
Even better than that fair distribution of loot is the way infusions and upgrades work. As a big Incantation user, I was worried how that mechanic would work since the starting classes we got to play as didn’t have a Finger Seal or anything similar to kick things off with, but FromSoftware expertly navigated that conundrum, too. Seals and other catalysts used for Spells and Incantations, in my experience, had two abilities attached to them with weapons similarly boasting infusions and skills. One Seal I found had Rejection and a fireball attack assigned to it, and a flail I found later was Cold-infused with its own Weapon Skill already preset with passives attached to both items that boost your stats just by equipping them. Through predetermined affinities and abilities like these, Nightreign removes the guesswork and planning to better optimize players’ experiences and get them into the next fight quicker rather than playing Inventory Manager 2025. It also helps that you have six weapon slots, and carry weight isn’t even a thing in Nightreign, so you can load your Nightfarer up to be a walking armory.
The revival system and some of the abilities do feel somewhat out of place in a game as grounded as Elden Ring, but that’s probably more due to experience with the FromSoftware library rather than how they work in Nightreign itself because in action, they’re pretty intuitive. A “Press X to Revive” button would look almost comical in Nightreign, so wailing on your teammate to get them back up is the next best answer. Between those new features, the automated leveling, and the way loot has been simplified, it’s bewildering to think that FromSoftware – a developer not exactly known for multiplayer despite most of its games featuring it to some degree – was able to implement these kinds of ideas so fluidly. If there was one multiplayer misstep to note from the preview, it’s that there’s no voice chat in Nightreign. That won’t be a problem for those partying up or communicating via Discord, but when planning your route to the “final ring” and deciding who gets what loot is so much easier over voice comms, it’s difficult to imagine as seamless an experience if you’re playing solo.
But voice comms and getting used to new ideas aside, Elden Ring Nightreign feels like a marvel of a spin-off. So many multiplayer spin-offs for games that just aren’t known for multiplayer at all seem to fizzle out or never get off the ground at all, so as a longtime Souls enjoyer, there was some hesitation to embrace something that felt like such a diversion from FromSoftware’s forte. But if a few hours with Nightreign is enough to assuage those worries, I can’t wait to see what the full, finished product shapes up to be.
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